Harryette Mullen
Harryette Mullen (born July 1, 1953) is an American poet, short story writer, and academic. Life Youth and education Mullen was born in Florence, Alabama and grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and attended graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Mullen began to write poetry as a college student in a multicultural community of writers, artists, musicians, and dancers in Austin, Texas. As an emerging poet, Mullen received a literature award from the Black Arts Academy, a Dobie-Paisano writer’s fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters and University of Texas, and an artist residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In Texas, she worked in the Artists in Schools program before enrolling in graduate school in California, where she continued her study of American literature and encountered even more diverse communities of writers and artists. Career Mullen has taught at Cornell University, and currently teaches courses in American poetry, African-American literature , and creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. While living in Ithaca and Rochester, New York, she was a faculty fellow of the Cornell University Society for the Humanities and a Rockefeller fellow at the Susan B. Anthony Institute at University of Rochester. She is also credited for rediscovering the novel Oreo, published in 1974 by Fran Ross. As of 2008, she lived in Los Angeles, California. Writing Mullen was influenced by the social, political, and cultural movements of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and women in the 1960s-70s, including Civil Rights, Black Power, the Black Arts Movement, Movimiento Chicano, and feminism. Her debut book, Tree Tall Woman, which showed traces of all of these influences, was published in 1981. Especially in her later books, Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, Muse & Drudge, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, Mullen frequently combines cultural critique with humor and wordplay as her poetry grapples with topics such as globalization, mass culture, consumerism, and the politics of identity. She wrote poems such as Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name. '' Critics, including Elisabeth Frost and Juliana Spahr, have suggested that Mullen’s poetry audience is an eclectic community of collaborative readers who share individual and collective interpretations of poems that may provoke multiple, divergent, or contradictory meanings, according to each reader’s cultural background. Recognition She has received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry, a Katherine Newman Award for best essay on U.S. ethnic literature, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her poetry collection, ''Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a PEN Beyond Margins Award for her Recyclopedia(2006). Mullen won the 4th annual Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2010. She appears in the documentary film, The Black Candle, directed by M.K. Asante, Jr. and narrated by Maya Angelou. Publications Poetry *''Tree Tall Woman''. Galveston, TX: Energy Earth, 1981. *''Trimmings''. New York: Tender Buttons, 1991. *''S*PeRM**K*T''. Philadelphia: Singing Horse, 1992. *''Muse and Drudge''. PHiladelphia: Singing Horse, 1995. *''Blues Baby: Early Poems''. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press (Bucknell Series in Contemporary Poetry), 2002. *''Sleeping with the Dictionary'' Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. *''Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse and Drudge'', 2006. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.Harryette Mullen b. 1953, Poetry Foundation, Web, Nov. 14, 2012. Short stories *"Bad Girls" and "Pica," in Her Work: Short Fiction by Texas Women, 1982; "Bad Girls" was reprinted in Lone Star Literature, 2002 *"What Can't Be Measured", in South by Southwest: Contemporary Texas Fiction, 1986 *"Sugar Sandwiches", in Lighthouse Point: An Anthology of Santa Cruz Writers, 1987 *"Tenderhead", in Common Bonds: Stories By and About Modern Texas Women, 1990; reprinted in The African American West, 2000 Critical Essays *'Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Our Nig, and Beloved", The Culture of Sentiment, 1992 *"Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness," Diacritics, 1994; reprinted in Cultural and Literary Critiques of the Concept of 'Race', 1997 *"'A Silence Between Us Like a Language': The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek", MELUS Journal, 1996 *"African Signs and Spirit Writing", Callaloo, 1996; reprinted in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, 2000, and The Black Studies Reader, 2004 *"'Apple Pie with Oreo Crust': Fran Ross’s Recipe for an Idiosyncratic American Novel", MELUS Journal, 2002 *"'Artistic Expression was Flowing Everywhere': Alison Mills and Ntozake Shange, Black Bohemian Feminists in the 1970s", Meridians, 2004 See also *List of U.S. poets References Notes External links ;Poems *Haryette Mullen at PoemHunter (9 poems) * Harryette Mullen profile & 18 poems at the Academy of American Poets. * Harryette Mullen b. 1953 at the Poetry Foundation. ;Audio / video *Haryette Mullen at YouTube * UCTV: 1/2 Video of Harryette Reading her Poetry ;About * Harryette Mullen in Gale Contemporary Black Biography. ;Etc. * "Add-Verse" a poetry-photo-video project Mullen participated in Category:1953 births Category:American feminists Category:American poets Category:Cornell University faculty Category:Language poets Category:Living people Category:Modernist women writers Category:20th-century poets Category:20th-century women writers Category:African American poets Category:African American female poets Category:English-language poets Category:Poets Category:Women poets Category:American women writers